31–40 of 64 posts
People are reading way too much into the Waymo incident. It was Chinese new year. There was a bunch of drunk people in the street. Somebody messed with the car, and then somebody else did, and so on. Until somebody threw a firework in there out of memetic one upmanship and it caught the thing on fire. You can see this in the videos. This was not ideological, it was just mob revelry gone awry.
In any civilized country, either the local or federal government wouldn't allow such thing.
But as it's America, its leaders believe it needs to be the forefront of everything in the world, so some sacrifices are allowed to be made in the name of the "greater good"(aka, corporate profits without regards into societal impact).
I bet those companies could be driving cars inside a closed space and still teach the car to drive in about the same timeframe, it's just because it's cheaper to do it in the streets while it hits humans and disrupt ambulances and the overall traffic. Those things can only happen in America.
Technocracy at its finest.
A car driven by a human is an extension of that human (for better or for worse) - and we can relate to that, no matter how much steel, glass and rubber there is. A car that drives itself is something alien, an abomination, a threat, a dangerous animal, small wonder we want to kill it - that is our most primal instinct.
“Maybe we should become a better moral actor” is a thought that will never be entertained in a corporate meeting room.
People are reading way too much into the Waymo incident. It was Chinese new year. There was a bunch of drunk people in the street. Somebody messed with the car, and then somebody else did, and so on. Until somebody threw a firework in there out of memetic one upmanship and it caught the thing on fire. You can see this in the videos. This was not ideological, it was just mob revelry gone awry.
Contemporary with that era, a Muni bus was burned in the aftermath of the Giants winning the world series. https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Knuckleheads-run-amok-a.... This was not interpreted as a stand against Muni.
Waymo cars are perhaps conveniently unoccupied and associated with an organization that can afford a loss. But I've seen very few 2012-like vibes about them (as a pedestrian and cyclist, and much more occasional customer, I basically like Waymo: its reaction speed to my presence is superhuman). They seem to keep their safety records open. I know about that recent unfortunate case involving a cyclist trying to ride tandem with a truck in an intersection, I suspect they'll be changing their programming.
I'm also a big fan of the collision avoidance on my normal Subaru. It's little doubt to me that computers are already mostly better than people at least collision avoidance, where alertness is often the element in shortest supply.
People are reading way too much into the Waymo incident. It was Chinese new year. There was a bunch of drunk people in the street. Somebody messed with the car, and then somebody else did, and so on. Until somebody threw a firework in there out of memetic one upmanship and it caught the thing on fire. You can see this in the videos. This was not ideological, it was just mob revelry gone awry.
https://www.salon.com/2018/10/16/googles-self-driving-cars-i...
That is a such an emblematic, iconic, fantastic image - the carcass of the car and all it represents, surrounded by humans somewhat curious but also somewhat satisfied, much as the first woolly mammoth kill must have been.
The entire scene was so vivid from an art point of view -- the mindless mob, the auto-power of gasoline, the heat, the useless reactions.. this was in the TV news long ago.
> We don’t yet know exactly why a group of people very publicly graffitied, smashed, and torched a Waymo car in San Francisco Having been to San Francisco lately, I would not be surprised to see all cars and houses smashed and burned. The city is basically that CHAZ thing in Seattle.
You're reciting a meme, informed by a moderate crime wave in and slightly after the pandemic, and amplified by partisan media and echo chambers like the one here on HN. In fact SF crime rates in virtually all categories are at 12+ year lows: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
I'd regard these statistics as, very generously, aspirational.
> We don’t yet know exactly why a group of people very publicly graffitied, smashed, and torched a Waymo car in San Francisco Having been to San Francisco lately, I would not be surprised to see all cars and houses smashed and burned. The city is basically that CHAZ thing in Seattle.
I, for one, would be surprised to arrive in SF and find all cars and houses smashed and burned.
> We don’t yet know exactly why a group of people very publicly graffitied, smashed, and torched a Waymo car in San Francisco Having been to San Francisco lately, I would not be surprised to see all cars and houses smashed and burned. The city is basically that CHAZ thing in Seattle.
You're reciting a meme, informed by a moderate crime wave in and slightly after the pandemic, and amplified by partisan media and echo chambers like the one here on HN. In fact SF crime rates in virtually all categories are at 12+ year lows: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/public-safety/violent-crime-rat...
yeah, thats not fake SF